Articles of faith: Religion's on road to extinction in nine countries, study finds

A team of scientists has used census data to predict the extinction of religion in nine countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. The United States didn't make the list, perhaps because the U.S. census doesn't ask about religious affiliation.

"In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40 percent, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60 percent.

The team used a "nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the 'non-religious' category. You can read the study online.

Weiner said the team is trying "to update the model with a "network structure" more representative of the one at work in the world.